Archive for the ‘Clessie Cummins’ tag

* How can one man own every model Mercedes ever built? Easy: He owns every (scale) model Mercedes ever built. What’s more, Mihail Neagu has taken to photographing them all, Michael Paul Smith style, and creating tiny people to populate his 1/18-scale worlds. (via)

* If you’ve been following the Dakar this year, you’ll note the usual amount of misadventure. What you likely won’t see, however, is the lead competitor’s vehicle stolen, but that’s exactly what happened in 1988, as Andy Hallbery wrote this week on Motorsport Retro.

* We always enjoy hearing about high school auto shop classes taking on restoration projects, like the one at Bettendorf High School in Bettendorf, Iowa, focused on teacher Joe Phillips’s 1928 Buick, a car that his grandfather once owned.

* Clessie Cummins may not have been as successful as he imagined at getting his diesel engines under the hoods of race cars or passenger cars, but he did convince the trucking industry to switch from gasoline to diesel engines, thanks in large part to his 1932 cross-country bus trip as highlighted this week by The Old Motor.

Visitors to this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed in England will get a rare chance to see Cummins’s No. 8 Duesenberg race car, which completed the Indianapolis 500 in 1931. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 500, the thundering oil burner will be one of a number of Indy cars displayed in the Formula One paddock at Goodwood.

Powered by a Cummins 100hp Model U diesel engine, the No. 8 was the first car to complete the 500-mile race without stopping, and it used only $1.40 worth of fuel. It was also the first diesel car to go faster than 100 MPH at Daytona Beach in Florida.

Interestingly, this won’t be No. 8′s first trip across the pond. Following its Indy 500 success, Clessie Cummins took the car on a tour of Europe in the early 1930s to drum up interest in his company and its products. Footage still exists of the car running around the famous Brooklands circuit in Surrey.

After the tour, Cummins incorporated his latest engineering developments in two cars that he entered into the 1934 Indy 500. The No. 5 car was fitted with a two-stroke engine, and the No. 6 car with a four-stroke engine. The cars set 12 different world records in the race, including highest speed and best finish for a diesel-powered car. The four-stroke proved more dependable, efficient and more powerful than the two-stroke variant, and the company stands by Clessie Cummins’s decision to abandon the two-stroke to this day.

The next landmark came in 1950, when the Cummins No. 61 Green Hornet went on to become the world’s fastest diesel, running 165 MPH on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah after competing at Indianapolis. The 340hp racing version of the JBS-600 engine with supercharging and new Cummins Pressure Time fuel injection set diesel speed records over one, five and 10 miles.

Following on from this success, Cummins Diesel Special No. 28 created a sensation at Indy in 1952, with a 139 MPH track record. It also took the coveted pole position, the first by a diesel car. The streamlined racer had a 430hp, low-profile JBS-600 engine and was the first at Indy with turbocharging. Unfortunately, damage forced No. 28 to retire after 100 miles when it was on pace with the race leaders. It did, however, prove the effectiveness of using turbocharging on diesel engines. The No. 28 car ran at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2000 and can be seen in the company’s museum at the head office in Columbus, Indiana.

If nobody else, Clessie Cummins had proved to Americans the viability of the diesel engine. Familiar with the Indianapolis 500 since crewing for Ray Harroun in the first such race in 1911, he returned in 1931 with a Duesenberg-built, diesel-powered race car that finished 13th, but managed to not only run the entire race without pitting (averaging 16 MPG), but also be driven to the track and back.

The fuel economy that the Cummins engine exhibited at Indy managed to attract the interest of truckers; the next year, Kenworth became the first truck builder to offer diesels as an optional engine. Yet automakers still believed the diesel engine was too heavy for passenger car use. Clessie Cummins set out to change that perception.

In June 1935, he debuted the result of that effort: a 1934 Auburn powered by an experimental Cummins Model A six-cylinder diesel. Where all of Cummins’s previous diesels used cast-iron engine assemblies, the Model A had an aluminum block and head, “making it more comparable in weight to a gasoline engine,” according to Cummins company literature. A Time article announcing the Cummins-powered Auburn noted that the Model A, which developed 85 horsepower from 377 cubic inches, weighed 80 pounds more than the Lycoming straight-eight that originally powered the Auburn (870 pounds total). Combined with a three-speed manual transmission and a two-speed rear axle, the 4,000-pound car was able to pull down 40.1 MPG on the first leg of a NY-to-LA transcontinental trip that Clessie planned to display the economy of the Model A engine. The trip, which lasted from June 17 to July 4, covered 3,774 miles and consumed just $7.63 worth of fuel; assuming the same fuel cost quoted in the Time article (and assuming my math is correct), that translates to an average of 44.5 MPG over the entire trip.

Cummins very nearly succeeded in entering automobile production with the Model A. According to Jim Donnelly’s profile on Clessie Cummins from HCC #62, November 2009, E.L. Cord asked Cummins to build three diesel-powered 1935 Auburn airport limousines. Cummins did, and one even appeared on a stand at the 1936 New York Auto Show, generating rumors that Auburn would soon offer diesels across its product line (and that Ford and Chrysler were right on Auburn’s heels). Yet Cummins couldn’t help but see that Cord and his empire couldn’t sustain production of gasoline-powered automobiles, let alone diesel-powered cars, for much longer, prompting Clessie Cummins to sever his relationship with Cord and Auburn.

The Auburns weren’t his first attempt at a diesel-powered automobile – he famously kept his company from going under in the early days of the Depression by fitting one of his Model U engines to a mid-Twenties Packard and exhibiting it at the 1930 New York Auto Show. Nor were they his last – he apparently also dropped one of his diesels into a 1938 Cadillac. Yet, had the Auburn venture panned out, Cummins and Cord could have laid claim to offering the first production diesel-powered passenger cars before Mercedes did so in 1936 with the 260D.

As for the four Auburns, one – Clessie Cummins’s personal car – still exists in the collection of Cummins. The company undertook a restoration of the car in 1974 and today displays it in its headquarters in Columbus, Indiana.

(Thanks to Michael Owen of Cummins for the pictures of the diesel-powered Auburn on display in the company’s headquarters.)

Here in the states, we just don’t associate diesels with automobiles. Trucks, yes, but never cars, and certainly not race cars. But Clessie Cummins kinda thought the other way: He had his first big break in a diesel-powered automobile and only after that did he realize that diesels are perfect for trucks and other commercial applications. Clessie, however, wasn’t the only diesel developer of his day, and while this week’s first article (from SIA #35, July-August 1976) explores Clessie’s contributions to the diesel world, the second takes a broader view of the European, American and Japanese contributions to diesel development for automobiles.